12 Monkeys & Your Flu Shots

Let’s start this week off with a movie quote.

This one is from 12 Monkeys. One of Terry Gilliam’s finest works. Much more successful than the comic tragedy that became Lost In La Mancha. If you haven’t seen Lost In La Mancha I can’t recommend it enough. It is a documentary about Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to remake Don Quixote.

Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt): Take germs for example.

James Cole (Bruce Willis): Germs?

Jeffrey Goines: Uh-huh. Eighteenth century, no such thing, nada, nothing. No one ever imagined such a thing. No sane person. Along comes this doctor, uh, Semmelweis, Semmelweis. Semmelweis comes along. He’s trying to convince people, other doctors mainly, that’s there’s these teeny tiny invisible bad things called germs that get into your body and make you sick. He’s trying to get doctors to wash their hands. What is this guy? Crazy? Teeny, tiny, invisible? What do they call it? Uh-uh, germs? Huh? What? Now, up to the 20th century, last week, as a matter of fact, before I got dragged into this hellhole. I go in to order a burger at this fast food joint, and the guy drops it on the floor. James, he picks it up, he wipes it off, he hands it to me like it’s all OK. “What about the germs?” I say. He says, “I don’t believe in germs. Germs is a plot made up so they could sell disinfectants and soaps.” Now he’s crazy, right?

Now this Ignaz Semmelweis was a real guy and he did discover germs and more importantly he realized the tie between hygiene and the spread of puerperal fever. This was a big problem for mother’s and newborns in the middle of the 19th century. It was passed from patient to medical staff and back to other patients.

Semmelweis figured out if the staff washed all the tools and themselves the rate of infection plummeted.

Unfortunately, it took 20 years for his learnings to be adopted by the medical community at large.

So if you missed out on a flu shot be sure to scrub your hands extra well this season.